abtw777

Those of us who want to ‘save the planet’ have a tough time. For one thing, someone’s sure to point out that the phrase, ‘save the planet’ is just human hubris. The planet got on just fine without us and it will get on just fine once we’re gone – so, strictly speaking, there’s no ‘saving’ needing done. Sure, the oceans will boil away – oh, and the atmosphere will be full of poisonous gas – oh, and, did I mention, all life will have gone extinct. But apart from all that, same dear old Mother Earth. So no saving to be done. Those folk who point this out are right of course. But the folk who are really irked by the saving-the-planet thing are the folk who ARE NOT trying to save the planet. Because, of course, pointing out to them that YOU are trying to save the planet and THEY are not – well, that just makes them really mad. They will see us as scaremongers. They will see us as fanatics. And, of course, they are also at least partly right. We planet-savers are often a motley b...

An ancient Chinese philosopher, Kung-Sun Lung, once said, ‘a white horse is not a horse.’ Now I don’t know if this was simply a one-off mysterious statement by Kung-Sun, or if he was in the habit of saying such things on a regular basis. And likewise, I don’t know how it was received by his contemporaries – whether he was regarded as a sage or as something of a fruitcake. But I want to unpack the saying a bit, because – whilst it may appear, at first, inconsequential – in fact it strikes a devastating blow to Western philosophy, science and religion. How so? you may wonder. Well, here’s how. At first strike, Kung-Sun might simply have meant that there are no truly white horses. Of course, this is surely true. But the real explanation – and true power – of the statement lies a little deeper. Take that word ‘white’. This is what we describe as a ‘universal’. A universal is not a mysterious thing – at least in theory. Adjectives – like ‘white’ here, in ‘the white horse’ – are...

How did it ever come to this? How is it that we – by which I mean humanity – find ourselves at war with aliens? Interstellar war! And all of our own making. It started, as these things often do, with some really trivial things. It started first with a philosophical puzzle. And this was the puzzle. How can you prove that a rhinoceros will not spontaneously appear in your room? The puzzle is attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein when he was a philosophy undergraduate student in England. He asked the question of his philosophy professor, and apparently felt that his professor could not adequately answer it. Now it may seem like a rather trivial and silly puzzle – and it is, in and of itself. But it tipped into something that would eventually become a major obsession of humanity and lead to the interstellar conflict that we now face. How did this happen? To answer that we have to go a little into the types of truth that are defined by philosophers. First up we have necessary and ...

How could someone smile so much? That’s what I was thinking, again, as another meeting got under way. The subject of my puzzlement was a young woman who was one of the facilitators of a spiritual encounter group I was attending. The girl with the woolly hat. Last week she had set an assignment. It was along the lines of – if you could change anything in the world, what would it be? This week we were reporting back. We were split into pairs for the discussion and I was paired with woolly hat girl. She beamed her smile at me, waiting expectantly for me to report on what I’d like to change out there in the world. My first thought had been forests. This fitted well with the style of the meetings, which – as well as their spiritual theme – were also geared toward an environmental ethic. Re-forest as much of the world as we can. But then it occurred to me that to carry out this miracle there would need to be some side issues to clear up – agriculture and human infrastructure and b...

I was buying my first house. My brother remarks that I must surely own a piece of land that goes all the way down to the centre of the Earth – tapering as it goes. I point out that the centre of the Earth is molten rock, like lava. And I for one did not want lava bubbling up through the floorboards and leaving burn marks on the carpet. As far as ownership goes, a depth of soil sufficient to grow a carrot would probably be enough. Bruv continues with my patch of the Earth continuing on upwards into the sky as an ever-widening slice of interstellar space. Depending on the large-scale structure of the universe, my piece of space might actually be infinite, or it might curve back on itself in some weird way. I point out that my new property is just a ground-floor flat. The neighbours might have something to say if I were to claim ownership of the sky or of interstellar space. And besides, what about aliens? So really I just had a little rectangle of real estate (or more precisely, a c...

The thing about people is that we do seem to contradict ourselves. Here’s a few examples. Progressive policies can be very popular, but when it comes to actually voting people vote for the opposite of what they claim to believe. People say we must do something about climate change, but when it comes to changing their own lifestyles they don’t want to do it. People say that kindness, intelligence and a good sense of humour are more important in a relationship than physical attraction, but then they marry for looks. Well, what do we make of all this? It doesn’t mean that people are bad, or deliberately dishonest. No. Just fickle! Because to know our own minds is a lot more difficult than it may seem. Try digging down into what you REALLY want out of life. Perhaps you find that straight-forward? But, wait up. You might not like what I’m about to say here, dear reader, but how do you know that you’re not deceiving yourself? How do you know that what you think you want is what you...

It was back in the 21st century that things started to get really bad – or, depending on how you look at it – started to get good! To be honest though, and like most changes, things had been brewing for quite a while before that. What makes a revolution? It starts with some very mundane and boring stuff! Perhaps a way of looking at it is through ‘infrastructure’. Infrastructure, for most of us, might be described as all the things we don’t see, or don’t think about, or take for granted (as long as they don't go wrong). The infrastructure issue gets difficult when it comes to technology. The thing about technology is that it seems so remote from the infrastructure that lies behind it. Hence, once we have a new gadget or whatever, then us ordinary folk see the gadget and not all of the infrastructure that must be there to make it work. Very often – and perhaps this was the crucial thing for the revolution I’ll be talking about – very often that infrastructure starts off as a ...